Thank you, Quim Gil and your team all the effort that went into discuss-space. We've seen a great platform being developed. It was far from ready, however, and my impression was we were in a pre-release phase. To add to the lessons learned, let me share my thoughts on this.
From the recurring feedback that the forum did not become part of
contributors' everyday workflow, that groups are still using facebook for similar purposes, we can deduce that a crucial feature-set was missing: integration with our everyday on-wiki workflow. This would include 3 features: * Notifications within Echo. * Automatic listing of active and on-topic discussions on wiki pages (in project namespace mostly). * Including (transcluding) discussions on wiki-pages.
The first one is crucial, the next two "just" very important. If there will be any similar solution in the future, these will be the hard criteria for adoption and success. Without these features the expectation that this forum becomes widely adopted was unfounded: it's still in its infancy and it was judged too early.
The foundation of it - an established forum engine - is solid, any solution that would be chosen in the future would recreate this or similar functionality. That would be a massive endeavour. The WMF devs have their hands full all the time, how would that be possible?
I'm sure the success of such a project hinges on the above critical features. Even if the WMF stops developing these features, nothing is lost: interest from volunteers might be enough to develop some of these features. I've shown interest in one of these, GSoC also will be an opportunity for motivated developers to contribute and grant proposals could be made for the most important features. In true collaborative fashion, the WMF can enable the community to turn this experiment into a fully-featured, integrated product. I believe this is the best path to take, that's in line with the Mid-Term Plan's targets.
On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 at 11:31, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
While we remain committed to this important goal ...
Given how overwhelming the positive expectations are about this project, I think the best path to take for the WMF is to halt the development, but continue operating the platform and motivate volunteers to get involved with its development. At least that's how I see the ideal role of WMF in our Movement.
The Space blog, which continues to fill
a need to share news for the movement by the movement, will continue in a new home.
A subjective note: I think both the blog and the forum would be more accessible on simpler URLs, I've always found "discuss-space" unusual. Wikimedia Space is a good name for those projects all together but in the URLs I find it confusing.
I would have suggested these URLs instead: * "discuss.wmflabs.org" * or simply "discourse.wmflabs.org" as usual in the free-software community * or "forum.wmflabs.org" (following the KISS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle principle) * "blog.wmflabs.org" * "events.wmflabs.org/calendar" * "events.wmflabs.org/map"
If any of these is released to production, ".wmflabs.org" would be replaced by ".wikimedia.org"
Thank you, Quim for asking feedback from the community.
Aron (Demian)